I start this blog with an apology. It’s been over week since I returned with my colleague Barry Pascolutti from a whirlwind trip to the USA. Since Cisco announced at the SEVT earlier this month that customers deploy CMS with VQ Conference Manager we have been inundated with Cisco, Partners and now customers wanting to know more about how to enable the service model they need for their users.
But I digress. We had been invited by our partner WWT to an exclusive event in Tampa to present and meet with 180 Federal customers. Barry and I joined the team from WWT and ran back to back demos and had many discussions with both customers, Cisco and potential clients. In addition to features such as Single sign-on and Blast dial/Reactive calls, it was interesting to hear the need for simple user tools like the Outlook Add-in/Plug-in, and of course the comprehensive Analytics for the Ops teams. It’s clear that Federal users typically experience constant turnover of staff due to deployment demands, so simple, out of the box tools are essential.
Then a short hop up to Washington DC and a major presentation at the Cisco Herndon office. Not a lot we can share, but the customers have some major CMS projects, and after a stellar demo by Barry and some intensive technical questioning, we believe we may have un-blocked a couple of major projects. Whilst in the building we then ran to another meeting room to join an internal Cisco webinar session called “Know your Stuff”; the audience being internal Cisco and wide ranging in their responsibilities.
So what did we learn? I start many of presentations in the USA stating we are two countries separated by a common language. That wasn’t the case when we got into how VQ Conference Manager and CMS enable the services users want.
Frankly CMS and VQ Conference Manager rocks.